A Maryville Public Safety official said this morning area residents were never in danger as the department battled a chemical spill yesterday afternoon in a ditch just north of U.S. Highway 136 near the 102 River.“It was a herbicide that would kill fish if it had gotten into the river,” MPS Lt. Phillip Rickabaugh, who is in charge of the fire division of Maryville Public Safety, said. “We didn’t want it to get into the river for environmental reasons. The chemical experts were telling us the chemical had been diluted to the point that it would not pose a threat to humans.”Rickabaugh said the incident began at about 1 p.m. when the herbicide Prowel escaped from the containment area at the MFA plant on North Depot Street. The herbicide found its way into a drainage ditch near the plant and water from the recent rains carried the chemical to another ditch along U.S. 136.

15 years ago

The rescue of a baby ripped from her strangled mother’s womb is being heralded by the Justice Department as reason to extend provisions of the Patriot Act.But some legal experts and civil libertarians say the finding of a safe Victoria Jo Stinnett the day after her mother’s killing had nothing to do with the anti-terror legislation. They say a document written two centuries — the Constitution — would have done just fine.“In this criminal case, the Patriot Act helped save one baby’s life,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told a gathering of the National Association of Counties in March, one of numerous Justice Department mentions of the case. “In the case of terrorism worldwide, such voluntary cooperation speed can save thousands of lives.”

Debris outside a partially demolished residence complex on the campus of Northwest Missouri State University caught fire Tuesday morning, filling the south end of vacant Hudson Hall with smoke.Units of the Maryville Fire Department received the call at about 9:30 a.m. and had the fire under control shortly after 10 a.m. Officers from the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Maryville Public Safety, Northwest’s Office of Campus Safety, the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Department and the Nodaway County Ambulance District also responded. There were no injuries.The university is tearing down Hudson Hall and adjoining Perrin Hall to make way for a new freshman residence complex. A demolition crew was at work on the site when the blaze broke out. School officials said a pile of old mattresses removed from the building earlier caught fire. There was no immediate word as to what caused the mattresses to combust.

5 years ago

About 50 veterans and their families gathered on the west lawn of the Nodaway County Courthouse Monday morning for a Memorial Day observance held, as noted in the invocation by the Rev. Leland LeRose, “to commemorate lives well lived but too soon ended.”Monday’s keynote address was offered by Sheila Trautz, a member of American Legion Post 464 in Conception Junction. Trautz served in the Air Force as a member of a military intelligence unit during the Gulf War in the early 1990s.Now a nurse for Mosaic Health Care in St. Joseph, Trautz paid a moving tribute to Americans who have died in uniform while serving their country, saying that “because of them our lives are free, and because of them our nation lives.”

For the past several years, the Maryville R-II School District has envisioned implementing a gifted program for some of its students.The school district had been attempting to find different ways of creating that special program — and has finally done so.“Gifted education has been something that has been prevalent in our state for the last several years,” R-II Assistant Superintendent Steve Klotz said. “Our district has not been a part of that process, but we studied it about seven years ago. We had some parents and administrators that made up a committee and studied it and had some plans.” …The need for a gifted program was obvious for Klotz because of the number of other schools in the area offering gifted programs. Maryville district personnel gathered information from other schools regarding how they run their programs.